


Scheat's Drift

by whoneedsapublisher



Category: We Know the Devil (Visual Novel)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:55:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24576433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whoneedsapublisher/pseuds/whoneedsapublisher
Summary: She knows why the Summer Scouts exist. But being told why doesn't always make you understand.
Kudos: 8





	Scheat's Drift

Scheat had never been entirely comfortable with the Summer Scouts.

She knew the reason why they existed, of course. She had obediently studied how the whole system worked, and she could recite the official justification from memory.

“Some children have strayed from the light, but no one is beyond God’s forgiveness. And so they can still be Scouts, and still fight against the Devil just the same, even if they have faltered.”

And of course it only made sense that the Devil would come to Summer Scouts often. If they were there, they’d already tilted in that direction, hadn’t they? Didn’t it make sense for them to fall more frequently?

But it always seemed… wrong to her. The conseleurs might say that the Summer Scouts were for redemption, for letting the light of God into dark hearts, but none of them treated it that way. Scouts were threatened with being sent to the Summer Scouts. Or praised by comparison to people who were Summer Scouts. And Scheat had been to the camp that the Summer Scouts used before, when she was sent to defeat the Devil. They didn’t seem happy. Their camp was too spread out, their groups too small, and everything was so... sad. Broken. Was this really supposed to put them back on the right path? No one there seemed to think they were going to change. None of them thought that they were getting better. Not even in the counselors.

She’d told herself it just seemed like that because of when she’d shown up. One of them had become the Devil, and their group had run away. Of course the others would be demoralized. That’s all it was. They were in a bad mood because of their a failure by one of their own.

She didn’t really believe that, but she told herself she did. She was good at telling herself things like that. What to feel. What to believe. Who she was. That was why she was in the Scouts, not the Summer Scouts. She could control herself. She could lock all her doors to the Devil, and keep her mind filled with God’s purity.

The next time she was sent there, things were different.

The first time, the adults around her hadn’t been concerned. Some had been annoyed (“Of course the Summer Scouts couldn’t handle it”), some had been almost amused and completely unsurprised (“Well, what else can you expect from them?”), and some had even been smug (“Alright, everyone, let’s show them how the _real_ Scouts do things.”).

This time though, it was different. The adults seemed somber. Worried. But they told her not to worry. And so she didn’t. They told her to hold her head high, and go in with confidence. And so she did.

The camp was different, too. Even though it wasn’t. As soon as she walked in, she could see that everything was the same, but nothing was even close to how it had been before. The lake was the worst of it all. Every single detail was identical, completely unrecognizably so. As if it was from another planet, taken directly from a snapshot of the last time she’d been there.

It made her nauseous. It felt like acid being dripped into her brain as she walked along the trails towards the cabin at the center of it all. All the iron chains she’d held her mind in place with corroded and rusted, no matter how quickly she locked them up again.

By the time she saw the three of them, she’d already lost. She was transformed, but it wasn’t her transformation. Her body fell away, and her chains were dragged along with it, all her careful locks breaking at once as everything she’d felt since she first learned about the Summer Scouts was set free.

“Welcome, Scheat,” they said.

And for the first time since she could remember, she truly was.


End file.
